This one’s a somewhat lighter post, mainly a few observations about how, of all things, New York City weather, social networking and mobile technology all seem to gel quite effectively these days.

Last week, just back from the ITP Spring Show at Manhattan’s Tisch School of The Arts, I took a quick break strolling across Union Square, on my way to Yaron Samid’s latest NY Video 2.0 meetup event.
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Who knew? Barack Obama, of all things, now as Microsoft Office Clip Art!

With almost half a billion copies of the software giant’s Office application suite installed around the globe, anyone featured here is likely seen more often than Kim Kardashian on Dancing With the Stars ever will.

Clearly, Microsoft’s clip art has the reach most media outlets crave - a real asset, especially in today’s increasingly disintermediated world.

Which brings up the question, who at Microsoft decides over who’s in (the library) and who stays out?

In lieu of an answer, I was curious enough to check what other contemporary or past celebrity made the cut according to Microsoft’s Clip Art staff.

Turns out, neither George W. Bush nor Bill Clinton are included.

Neither is Adolf Hitler. (Thought I’d check, just to be sure).

But Mahatma Gandhi is.

And so is Abraham Lincoln.

Which brings us right back to Barack Obama, who has recently received much (self-induced) comparison to the iconic 16th US President.

Is someone in Redmond having fun channeling the travails of current-day politics via cliché PC clip art?

The cell phone has been fodder for art projects for a little while now. Here are a few pieces I’ve come across recently - a few personal favorites…

This is an installation by a Boston artist by the name of Rob Petit. At the very least, you’ve got to give him credit for meticulousness - and the sheer number of discarded phones he uses in some of these pieces says a little something about how ubiquitous, disposable (and environmentally unfriendly) the devices have become. For more images of his images, go here. - this is clearly a guy who thinks a lot about cell phones.

    
Here we have an installation from the European art/technology collective informationlab.  “Cell Phone Disco” is basically a grid of sensors and LED that allows users to draw shapes with their with their active cellphones.  OK, maybe the concept strikes me as a bit shallow (an impression reinforced by the unfortunate title), but I think approaching technology with a certain amount of playfulness is almost always A Good Thing - and indeed the installation has proven very popular, showing across Europe and in several American cities as well.

   
I like cars. Like most car fetishists, there are a few websites I enjoy wasting a little time with from every so often, and one of my favorite bookmarks is rinspeed, a Swedish auto design firm with a soft spot for vintage Porsches.  At this year’s Geneva Auto Show, Rinspeed is showing the electric concept car the “ichange.”  What’s cool about the ichange is that most functionality (iginition, lights, ventilation, etc.) is controlled by an iphone app.  Not only is leveraging the power of a smartphone the driver already owns rather than building out a full traditional dashboard is an interesting take on green design - it also insures you won’t be able to make calls while you drive!

Every now and then I come across a great website.  For example, consider The Computer History Museum (located in some area of California called “Silicon Valley” of all places), which has one terrific set of online exhibits.  In particular, the History of the Internet is worth a look, if only to remind ourselves of the humble origins of (and the people responsible for) the immense packet-switched beast we now rely on for buying airline tickets, getting jobs, and finding love.

I mean, look at this cover illustration from Computing Magazine circa 1979 - how dated and yet how prescient is that?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a new and interesting way some recording artists have started to use the internet: in an "if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em" move, several pop acts have decided to embrace the medium to the extent of making even the individual elements (the discrete instrumental and vocal parts that make up the recording as a whole) of some of their work freely available online.  The general public can download these ’stems’, alter them, edit them, add new material, and put it all back together as a new (and hopefully interesting) creation of their own.

Completing the circle, these remixes can then be uploaded back onto the original artists’ websites, for sharing and commentary.

Just a few artists hosting public remix "contests": Radiohead , Mariah Carey , Franz Ferdinand , Third Eye Blind , and Nine Inch Nails …

And so you have fans, aspiring DJs, and recording studio professionals all sharing their creations side by side on the original artist’s website: a fundamental redefinition and flattening of of the artist/audience relationship, the composition/production relationship, and an obvious musical corollary to web 2.0 - ‘open source music’, if you will…


All well and good. But while that’s what the cool kids have been up to, along comes Microsoft Research with a decidedly uncool demo of their new $29.95 Songsmith application. This program will take a melody sung into your computer’s audio input and generate chords and accompaniment based on on the pitches it detects, the styles you select, and the settings of parameters with names such as "Happy" and "Jazzy" (more on the modeling and algorithms behind all that here) .
Whether or not this is an intriguing or a sadly misguided use of technology is open for discussion - what’s more interesting (to me, at least) are the cover versions of popular songs now starting to appear up on Youtube using the original vocal tracks as Songsmith input material. Some (such as this version of Oasis’ "Wonderwall") are almost musical - while others (such as this take on Van Halen) are just kind of cringe-inducing.


It would be all to easy to come down on Songsmith as fundamentally anti -musical (a lot of people have seen that unfortunate Microsoft demo video and done just that) - but consider this: if you believe (as I do) that a little play-time is healthy for us grownups too, what’s so bad about software that lets people have some fun with their computer creating these Soundsmith cover version/remixes?  Maybe they’ll be inspired to use the software to take it a step further and at least get at least a whiff of what it might be like to write a song on their own from scratch…

So while it might not be for everyone, I think Microsoft Songsmith is just fine, for what it is - unleashing the inner Moby within all the John Hodgman s out there…

As part of my ‘other life’ as a music composer/producer, about a year ago I was invited to give a workshop at the Banff Centre for the Arts in studio production.  To teach my approach to mixing, I decided to bring the individual tracks from a recent piece I had done - almost 30 discrete sound files with one instrument or part on each, that together made up the piece as a whole.  These were then remixed by the students during the workshop while I coached the sessions - not only a great way to demonstrate my personal production and mixing methodologies, but (somewhat unexpectedly) it was also very interesting to see how others approached and altered the material.

Now consider the Web 2.0 model, in which there’s no longer just that one-way street running from server to client - instead, communication occurs in a more reciprocal and viral manner.   Well, as it happens, there’s a near-perfectly analogous phenomenon going on with recorded music: much as I had done, artists are making the individual elements (or “stems”) that taken together comprise their finished recordings freely available online - to to be freely downloaded, deconstructed, altered, and remixed by anyone who cares to.  The power of today’s personal computer and the ubiquity of multitrack digital audio applications such as Apple’s included-with-the-OS  Garage Band make this possibility for everyone, not just us recording studio types.

It appears Thomas Friedman was right, the world is getting flatter….

A few examples:

• Easily 20 years ahead of its time, David Byrne and Brian Eno’s 1981 release “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” was, at the risk of understatement, a groundbreaking record (just ask Moby, who built a career on his 1999 homage, “Play”).  Concurrent with a 2006 Bush of Ghosts re-release, Byrne and Eno made stems of several tracks available to the public and hosted an online remix competition, in which remixes could be uploaded back to the site and then voted on - results of which can be heard here.

• Kudus to Warner Music Group for going along with Byrne and Eno on the open licensing.   Radiohead, on the other hand, having had abandoned their traditional major label to release their latest album “In Rainbows” online themselves this year, could do whatever they pleased with the material - which was to simultaneously give away stems of the track “Nude” online for a similar remix competition.  The response from both professional DJs and producers as well as the general public was described by the band as ‘overwhelming’ - so much so, in fact,  that another track (”Reckoner“) was subsequently given away for remix as well.

Think of it as “open source music” (in fact, Byrne and Eno used the same Creative Commons license well-known in the open source software community to make the stems available).

I’m not a gamer - for me, though, (and maybe you?) this is a great way to have some fun with your computer. Try it out sometime… a little bit of creative playing around is good for you.

This is from my favorite video sharing site, vimeo.com - the bitrates are much higher (and generally the videos are more interesting) than what’s up there on other sharing sites.

This particular video is a good example of how good Adobe’s Flash HD content can look.

Vimeo (like Hulu) is serious about HD content, and if you have Flash Player 9 (Flash Player 10 is currently in beta), check it out. At the time, I was getting 2.5 Kbps down with 124 ms latency from the Los Angeles Speakeasy speed test server (not great) and I had good stream.

I’m curious about how HD flash is working for other folks…